Oracle takes Exalogic appliances into private cloud with 2.0 release
Database giant Oracle continued its push into the datacentre on Wednesday with the announcement of version 2.0 of its Exalogic appliance software, which will see the devices upgraded for private cloud deployments.
The Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0 technology brings Oracle VirtualMachine 3.0 to the systems, giving them the ability to support heftier virtual machines, simplified management and more sophisticated workload and power management.
"A lot of the improvements you are seeing here are the ways we're rearranging software," Ajay Patel, vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware, said on a call discussing the technology. "It's [become] a virtualised cloud platform."
Oracle released its Exalogic systems in 2011 - a key part of the company's engineered system strategy, which sees it develop software and hardware together in the hopes of giving customers better performance. However, critics have said itamounts to a strategy of vendor lock-in.
With the update, Exalogic appliances can now support up to 128 virtual CPUs and 1TB of memory per guest virtual machine. This means companies can run processing-intensive data mining or analysis applications on VMs, while gaining the flexibility benefits innate to virtualisation.
As a result, Exalogic now has "near physical performance on a virtualised environment," Patel says.
The scalability of the machines has increased as well - by integrating Oracle Traffic Director the appliances gain an internal load balancer for routing jobs according to overall system capacity. This pairs with the Oracle Exabus, which forms a high-speed communications layer within the device.
Oracle has as yet made no mention of any links to the Oracle Public Cloud, so for the moment these machines don't appear to be capable of pushing into the cloud when they have exhausted their native hardware capacity.
Appliance-style systems have become all the rage recently, with IBM entering the fray in April with its similarly-capable PureSystems. Along with this, HP, VMware - via the Virtual Computing Environment systems - and NetApp via vBlocks all sell similar platforms.
At the time of writing Oracle had not responded to queries relating to pricing and availability.